“You’re suggesting that Erewhon might be considering a… closer relationship with Haven?” Honor said sharply, and he nodded.

“As I say, we have no proof of it, but we’ve been conducting quiet, one-on-one negotiations with several of the Alliance’s smaller members.” She regarded him intently, and he shrugged with a curious mixture of apology and irritation. “No one’s interested in sneaking around behind the Star Kingdom’s back, Honor. Not really. But let’s face it. Thanks to High Ridge’s idiotic foreign policy, the Alliance is in serious disarray at the moment, and we’ve been doing our best to try to put out the various fires before they get entirely out of hand and bring the entire structure down.”

“I see.” Honor understood exactly what he meant, and she felt a dull throb of shame at the thought of how hard Benjamin had obviously been working to preserve the vital alliances High Ridge equally obviously never wasted a single night’s sleep worrying about.

“At any rate,” Benjamin went on after a moment, “some of the things the Erewhonese ambassador’s said in those discussions sound a lot more like the sort of temporizing and qualifying that usually go on between states that don’t entirely trust one another—or who have something to hide—than the way allies are supposed to speak to each other. I don’t think it’s his idea, either. I think he’s acting on formal instructions from his government, and that makes me wonder just why they’re holding not just the Star Kingdom but all of us at arm’s length. And one possibility which suggests itself to me is that they might be considering jumping the other way.”

“My God, but I hope you’re wrong!” Honor said fervently after two or three heartbeats. “After Grayson, Erewhon has the largest navy in the Alliance.”

“And access to all of our new hardware,” Benjamin pointed out grimly. Honor inhaled sharply, and he shrugged. “Their industrial base isn’t as good as ours is because it was never as completely modernized and overhauled as ours was. But at the very least, they have examples of everything short of Ghost Rider—and some of that technology, too, I think. And if the Peeps get a chance to reverse engineer that…”

Honor shivered as the possibility Benjamin had just evoked blew through her bones like the breath of space itself.

“I was going to try pressing the Admiralty to increase the force levels they’re projecting for Sidemore Station on the basis of your first little bombshell,” she told him after a long, thoughtful moment. “Now I’m not at all sure that would be a good idea. Not if the Peeps—I mean, not if the Republic—is likely to be taking the wraps off something Shannon Foraker came up with after they gave her a big budget to play with! And if there’s even the possibility that you’re right about what the Erewhonese might be considering, that only makes the situation even worse.”

“I’d have to agree that thinning out the RMN even further probably wouldn’t be a very good idea,” Benjamin conceded. “I hate to admit it, but even though our navy is almost half the size of the Star Kingdom’s active fleet, we’re not the ones that exercise a deterrent effect. Everybody keeps their eye on Manticore; we’re just the ‘plucky little scrapper’ that plays backup to the Royal Navy.” Honor looked at him in quick alarm, but he shook his head. “That wasn’t resentment talking, Honor. It’s just the way things are, and it would be unreasonable to expect that perception to change this quickly, no matter what’s happening to the relative size of our fleets. The important thing is that when it comes to the perception game, the size of the RMN’s deployable assets matters a lot more than the size of the GSN.”